CineSavant Column

Thank providence for the long Presidents’ Day weekend — I respect those gentlemen of the past more than ever now.

Just a couple of links for the day, courtesy of the helpful Charlie Largent:

Janus Films, the film library associated with The Criterion Collection, now has a catalog of all their holdings on site with numerous images. Usually they’re listed right under the film info but sometimes you need to scroll to ‘Details:’ Janus Films Reference. Criterion of course licences plenty of its product from studios and other outside vendors, but it’s good to have this handy reference to what’s actually in the Janus library on film and videodisc.

And Charlie has come through with an even more interesting resource, an online repository of movies called Rarefilmm: the Cave of Forgotten Films. Most are in fine shape; going through the very long list I was shocked to see several titles I’ve been looking for seemingly forever, including an excellent copy of a Georges Franju movie. Just be advised that the alphabetized list doesn’t skip initial words like ‘the’ and ‘la,’ so that La maison sous la mer (1947) is placed under ‘L,’ not the expected ‘M.’ Good hunting, and let me know if you see something great that I should check out!